Saturday, 22 November 2014

Large swarms of stupid minions

One of the reasons I got involved with cultural evolution and memetics was the belief that
humanity badly needed a solid science of cultural evolution to help successfully navigate
the transition to a world economically dominated by machine intelligence.

The coming memetic takeover will be a kind of genetic takeover - and there are good reasons
to believe that these are likely to be disruptive evolutionary events - accompanied
by mass extinctions and the loss of significant quantities of adaptive information.
A rapid transition seems as though it would be undesirable - with an
increased chance
of things getting lost or damaged.

One of the conclusions my my studies so far so far has been that the geologically-recent
explosion of cultural evolution that we are now witnessing was triggered more by social
networking skills than by factors associated with brain size or intelligence.

Human behavioural imitation apparently required the complex ability to mentally
put yourself in another person's shoes while watching them perform tasks. For our ancestors,
this appears to have required relatively advanced cognition - as ably explained by
Susan Blackmore in
The Meme Machine.
So, there is a limited sense in which the conventional wisdom that "intelligence did it" is correct.

However, in memetics, large brains are seen more as a consequence of cultural evolution
than a cause of it. Big brains have evolved to be meme nests.
Large brains are the nervous system equivalents of ant domatia.
They are homes for memes. Psychological support for cultural transmission -
rather than intelligence - was really the key here.

This strongly suggests that sub-human level machines could effectively reproduce
the human explosion in cultural evolution. Machines can copy each other easily.
We can engineer them to be social. I think this means that we can forget about
attempts to directly reproduce "human level" machine intelligence, and work
instead on swarms of relatively stupid minions. Then the power of collective
intelligence and the wisdom of crowds can be used to get them to perform
useful work for us. It will be a new kind of
society of mind.

Machine progress has occurred largely by them being strong in domains where
we are weak. If the aim is to reproduce human cultural evolution in a
machine-based substrate (in order to better make progress) then a
frontal attack on directly reproducing human cognition in machines
doesn't seem to make very much sense.

To a large extent, I think that using swarms of minions is largely
what humans have been doing anyway. We do already have huge numbers of
not-too-smart computer systems - and we have been a putting considerable
amount of effort into networking them together.

Today, much of the main action is in the process of moving out of brains
and into data centers. I expect data centers to become the main social
centers for machines. The coming explosion of machine intelligence looks
set to take place in the computing cloud.

Interestingly, data centers are usually out of town - where land is cheap.
The centers of machine civilization and human civilization thus look set
to be geographically separated - although intimately connected by high-speed
networks. This will create an interesting dynamic.